


By Threads

by orphan_account



Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: All Ways, Always, Canon-Typical Violence, Case Fic, Gunshot Wounds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-12
Updated: 2018-08-16
Packaged: 2019-06-26 12:32:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15663297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Olivia Benson is shot by a suspect. Rafael Barba rushes to her side. They haven't seen each other in months.This was supposed to be the 4th story in "Permutations": 1k-3k words, short and sweet and tropey. Here I am at 3000 words and Barba hasn't even arrived at the hospital yet. So apparently I'm writing another long-form story.





	1. Chapter 1

On a Saturday night in October, a 16-year-old girl called 911 from a club in the East Village frequented by perenially-new-to-New-York NYU students whose idea of fun was pounding hard liquor until their livers burned. The girl and her best friend had bought fake IDs and had taken the train in from Ronkonkoma. The friend seemed overly tipsy and drowsy after just one drink, a vodka cranberry that, thanks to the club owner’s penny-pinching, was awfully light on vodka for the $12 they’d charged her credit card. The officers who’d first arrived on the scene caught Shane Firsey, a 21-yearold also from Long Island, sneaking out the door with a few doses of rohypnol in his jacket pocket.

“She asked me for drugs,” Firsey insisted to Rollins when she and Fin had him in interrogation after midnight. “She paid me fifty bucks, I’m telling you.”

“Rohypnol. Isn’t. Recreational,” Rollins said, enunciating each word as she stood, pressing her palms down on the table.

“You’re just saying that to get me in trouble,” Shane said. 

Fin laughed. “Ask me how many undercover narcotics operations I’ve run.”

The self-isolating, cultlike church that Shane’s parents belonged to sent over a suburban defense attorney who accompanied Shane to arraignment court. His $100k bail was posted within hours.

A week later, he was picked up again, caught by a parking attendant raping a 16-year-old who he’d drugged in a club two blocks down the street sometime earlier that night. This time, the arraignment judge ordered $500k bail, which was once again posted immediately. Benson, exhausted for more reasons than she could count at this point, chewed Stone out for not insisting that Shane be held without bail, and for not bringing up the fact that the cultlike church his family belonged to held seemingly unlimited financial resoruces.

The case seemed cut-and-dry, but the defense attorney cast doubt on the parking lot attendant, who’d been running credit card scams o local students, and the case collapsed. The victim, who’d been unconscious, couldn’t testify as to who raped her. The jury decided that there was enough reasonable doubt to find Shane not guilty.

Benson went to Jack McCoy to ask for a new ADA. He reminded her that Stone had been a top prosecutor in Chicago. “A top homicide prosecutor,” Benson said. “Put him on homicide. Give me someone with experience with special victims.”

“I’ll consider it, Lieutenant,” McCoy promised, and Benson bit her tongue.

The first week of December, Rachel Waller, a 17-year-old emancipated minor who’d been living with her aunt ever since she’d left the church on Long Island that the Firsey family were prominent members of, came into the SVU squadroom. Rollins took her into Benson’s office, where she told them that despite her and her aunt’s objections — some filed formally in the family and guardianship courts — her 20-year-old sister, Emily, had been “married off” to Shane. The Wallers and the Firseys had told Emily that Shane’s prior convictions were for drink driving. Emily’s developmental disabilities meant that, although she could have a promising life if Rachel and their aunt could just get them out of that godforsaken church, she most likely couldn’t consent to the marriage, especially if her parents had kept information from her and outright lied. 

“Prior convictions?” Benson asked Rachel. “Shane was found not guilty, and the original assault we picked him up on doesn’t even have a trial date yet.”

“My aunt found out that Shane has two convictions in a sealed record in Oregon. The guardianship people and our lawyers couldn’t get them unsealed because they were from a juvenile court. One of the lawyers we’ve been working with said to come to you. You investigated the case and I need to get that marriage annuled and Emily out of his house and away from my parents.”

Benson promised Rachel that they’d do what they could. Stone said he’d work on getting the Oregon convictions unsealed, but it was unlikely, because they were from juvenile court. He was going to push for attempted rape charges on the original assault, though, which meant that if he did by some chance get those records unsealed, they’d at least be admissible as evidence in the new trial.

— 

Two times in one year with a gun trained on her in an enclosed space was a lot, even for Olivia Benson. 

A third attempted assault in an abandoned building in Lower Manhattan had been caught on a closed-circuit camera installed by real estate developers. Benson and Carisi headed out to Oceanside to pick up Shane, who lived in an apartment above his parents’ garage with his new wife, Emily. Rachel and her aunt had been unable to get the marriage annuled. 

The apartment above the garage would have elicited a million curses from a million firefighters: the only way in and out was a ladder that connected to a trapdoor of sorts so that you came up through the floor, like in a home’s attic. So, as soon as Benson came up and had her feet fully inside, she was irrevocably trapped by Shane pointing a gun at her head. 

Benson looked up at the window installed into the sloped roof of the garage, her only hope, if it opened at all. A faint hope, because it was behind Shane and well above her head. 

Carisi radioed for backup.

Benson tried to reason with Shane. His hands were shaking. She heard a helicopter and voices outside, and she knew they were going to decide that their only option was to take a shot at Shane through the window. They _always_ decided taking a shot through a window was their best option, and Shane’s finger was trembling on the trigger, and it was Nassau PD out there, a different radio frequency, a frequency she couldn’t reach —

A shot, and then a second shot, the sounds reverberating against each other, her face burning, hot, a searing pain in her leg —

Carisi shouting a thousand curses at Nassau PD —

Carisi: “Yeah, I got it tied off, looks like it might have stopped.”

Hazy light, muted sounds for a few minutes. Carisi again: “Lieu, paramedics have got to strategize a way to get you down without the bullet moving, I’ve been sending them pictures of your leg, okay? They said it doesn’t look like an artery, so that buys them some time to figure it out. Stay with me, Lieu, stay with me.”

“Noah,” she whimpered.

“I’m going to teach him how to make dinner for you while you recover.”

“He’s six.”

“I could make pasta e fagioli before I was four.”

“No you couldn’t.”

“I could.”

“Liar.” She smiled and felt the tears hot on her cheeks, then heard noises below. “What’s happening?”

“They’re working on getting you out safely.”

“Because,” she said, swallowing hard, “otherwise the bullet or a piece of it could go straight to my lungs, or my heart.”

“Don’t think about that.”

“Noah,” she said again.

“Think of Noah.”

“Carisi.” She squeezed the detective’s hand. “I have a will that says Noah is to go to Rollins.”

“Don’t worry about that now.”

“I _have to_ ,” she insisted. “Rollins signed off on it. When I’m in the hospital, when I’m in surgery, if they get me the hell out of here, you need to call Trevor Langan and make sure the Porters, if there are any ones out there we didn’t find, can’t file for custody. Can you do that for me?”

“You’re going to be fine, but, yes.”

A wave of pain crashed into her leg, hard. How stupid had she been to climb a ladder into a room where there was unlikely to be any other exit? No, of course she wasn’t stupid, she’d realized beforehand that if they asked Shane’s parents to have him come down to the house, they’d tell him to run. She remembered something Barba had told her after Noah had been kidnapped and returned to her, when he’d come to visit them at home: “You can’t beat yourself up for thinking your instincts are wrong. Sometimes _their_ instincts are bad.”

Rafa. She could see his face before the trial, that night when they met with Dworkin at Forlini’s, when Barba’s eyes were red, his hair suddenly dappled white, his forehead wrinkled, the horror of being tried for murder over an act that might have been pled out with probation.

The night before the verdict came in, she’d walked him home. Outside his building, she’d squeezed his hand, a small gesture of support. His hands were cold. He was scared. 

She remembered how he tried to hide how scared he was.

She remembered how he clung to her in his lobby, how she invited him to stay at her place so he didn’t have to be alone that night, how he turned down the offer and asked how she’d explain it to Noah if he went to jail. 

“We got you, we got you,” she heard Carisi say. She was upside down, maybe. She couldn’t orient herself.

“Noah,” she said when they were in the ambulance. Tears set her eyes and the space beneath them on fire. 

“It’s all right,” Carisi said. “Lucy’s with him, I called her after they got you down. You’re all right.”

The paramedic said something about surgery to remove the bullet, something about her brain, her lungs, her heart, something about fragments. “You need me to call anybody else?” Carisi asked.

In the last eight, ten years, her world had narrowed considerably. There was no one else. Her world had narrowed, too much, and if she didn’t make it, all Noah had was the SVU’s senior squad, maybe Lucy, and the defense attorney who’d promised to look out for his interests.

“I don’t have anybody else,” she admitted to Carisi, stripped bare of all her pretensions. “I have Noah.”

“You’ll pull through for him,” Carisi promised. “And for me, and Amanda, and Fin, and — if you need more people, I’ve got a load of Carisis I can lend you.”

She forced a smile. “Shane,” she said. “What happened to Shane.”

“Dead at the scene.”

“We needed him _tried_. We needed to be able to make — to make — legal precedent.”

“Yeah. PD didn’t know how to do it any other way. They brought in a hostage negotiator but Shane wasn’t interested.”

“We’ve got work to do in family court, still,” she said. “Emily will go right back to the parents who got her into this situation,”

“Hard to do anything about it since she’s over 18.”

“Worst part is, she could live on her own if she had a support program, a social worker, and parents who didn’t lie to her.”

“I’ll work on it,” he said. “I’ve got a friend in family court. I’ll see what I can do.”

Benson squeezed his hand. “Thank you.”

—

Barba hadn’t worked in a courtroom in almost a year. The sharp-tongued prosecutor who got witnesses to confess on the stand, the uniquely focused ADA who’d spent days in front of a grand jury taking down a major airline, was gone, replaced by a man who, after being tried for murder on account of the misguided decision to interfere in a family’s right-to-die case in a manner that went way beyond his scope of practice as a lawyer, panicked whenever he had to set foot in a courtroom. 

For the past ten months, he’d been working as an associate at a firm that handled family law in Suffolk County. New York was the only state in which he was licensed to practice law, so he’d have had to either remain jobless for months while he waited to take, and pass, the Bar exam in another state, or work here, out in the Atlantic Ocean, to get away from Manhattan SVU, to get away from what his six-year stint there had turned him into. 

He pushed papers. He met with families. He advocated for them in offices, in boardrooms, in judges’ chambers. That didn’t bother him, that didn’t get to him any more than it used to. When a tough case made him ball his hands up into fists, he fought harder, made sure the children involved were protected. But when a case went to trial, or when there were hearings or procedures that took place in a courtroom, he passed those duties on to a colleague.

He tried, twice.

The first time, he (barely) made it though a short hearing, holding himself together by threads. His heart raced. The hairs on his arms stood up. He was unreasonably warm, his throat dry, his tonsils threatening to obstruct his breathing, his stomach dropping repeatedly to his knees. He held it together, by threads, slowly shredding threads, so the arbitartor and opposing counsel couldn’t tell that he couldn’t get Stone’s _do you feel guilty_ , the _do you feel guilty_ that sounded like a condemnation to hell, out of his head. He held it together until he threw up in a courthouse bathroom stall, beads of sweat sliding across his forehead, his body shaking. 

He didn’t fare much better the second time. After he argued on behalf of his client, everyone else clueless as to the horror running cold in his veins, he was sick to his stomach for days.

His firm had helped emancipate Rachel Waller, and was working with Rachel and her aunt to get Emily Waller’s marriage to Shane Firsey annuled. Barba knew that if he could have put himself back together and walked confidently into a courtroom like he used to, he could have stopped the marriage from taking place.

He’d been fighting with DAs in Washington and Oregon to get old records unsealed. In the newer records, the ones from New York County, he saw familiar names: _Det. Amanda Rollins, Lt. Olivia Benson, NYPD_. 

Liv was trying to get those records unsealed too. 

They were working the same case, and she had no idea. 

He’d been the one who’d sent Rachel to see her. 

“Rafael, you in there?” His colleague Alicia, who’d been going to court in his place, knocked on his half-open office door. It was after 2, and he was eating lunch at his desk. If he couldn’t be Rafael Barba in a courtroom anymore, he was at least going to be Rafael Barba everywhere else. 

“Still here,” he asnwered.

“So.” She came into the office and shut the door behind her. “Shane Firsey is dead.”

Barba looked up. “Okay, this removes one step from the process of getting Emily out of the Firseys’ house and away from her parents. What happened?”

“There was a third incident in Manhattan, and when they went to arrest him, Shane pointed a gun at a police lieutenant.”

Barba’s face fell. 

“This was NYPD?” He tried to hide the alarm in his voice. “What happened with the lieutenant?”

Alicia looked at her phone. “Nassau PD took a shot at Shane through the garage window, he might have had his finger on the trigger, shot Lieutenant Benson of NYPD in the leg. You know how he lives up in that room over the garage? Of course you do, you’re the one who reported it to the fire department, I heard. Paramedics couldn’t figure out how to get her out of there.”

“Any word on her status?” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “The, the lieutenant.”

She sat in the chair in front of his desk. “You worked with her?”

“Yes.” 

“There was a press conference ten minutes ago. She’s in emergency surgery. I’ll have Laura file a motion and —” Alicia cut herself off and searched Barba’s face. “And find out what hospital she’s in.”

“They usually take them to Mercy. I can find out myself. Have Laura take care of those motions.”

He tried Carisi, Rollins, and Fin, whose numbers he still had stored in his phone, as much as he’d wished for a clean break from his six years with Manhattan SVU. No one picked up. Finally, after ten minutes, Carisi called him back. 

“Carisi,” the detective answered, as if he didn’t recognize the number on the other end. 

Barba breathed in sharply. “How is she?”

“Rafael?”

“Yes. Rachel Waller is one of my clients. I heard Liv was shot when she went to arrest Firsey.”

“She’s been in surgery the last two hours, no word yet. I’m in the third floor waiting room at Mercy, the 34th Street entrance.”

“All right. Will they let me in if I come down?”

“Lots of NYPD around, but I’ll vouch for you.”

Barba locked his office and hurried downstairs to catch the Long Island Railroad, hoping there would be good news when he arrived at Mercy.


	2. Chapter 2

“Sorry,” the security guard in Mercy Hospital’s main lobby told Barba, “only NYPD and family are allowed up there right now.”

“Detective Dominick Carisi will vouch for me,” Barba said, his fingers already flying across his smartphone screen, texting Carisi. “I’ll wait.”

He had to wait ten minutes for Carisi to come down and get him. In the elevator, Carisi laid an open hand on Barba’s back, over his long tan coat. “She’s been in surgery almost three hours,” he said. “No word yet.”

Outside the elevator bank upstairs, he saw unformed officers, the crowds of PD becoming more dense as they made their way to the waiting room. “This normal?” Barba asked, half under his breath.

“For a police lieutenant who was held hostage and might have been hit by friendly fire, yeah.”

Barba gritted his teeth. 

“See,” Carisi continued, “a lot of these guys are internal affairs and Nassau PD brass. Firsey definitely fired his gun, but CSU found a shell casing and a hole in a bookshelf. The Nassau guys are all here eagerly awaiting to see what kind of bullet they take out of Liv.”

Barba turned his head slowly and surveyed the room. There were maybe 15 people in there, all worried for 15 different reasons. In the corner, he recognized an IAB investgator from his days in Brooklyn, talking to Ed Tucker, whose head was bowed in concern.

Barba flinched. Carisi, ever observant, caught the change in his expression. 

“He’s been retired a year now. One of his buddies from hostage negotiation called him when we were heading here, and he came in with some of the IAB folks.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Barba said.

“Hey, Barba.” He recognized Rollins’ voice behind them. “She’ll be so happy to see you when she wakes up.” Her voice was cracking; she was trying to convince herself, too. “She’s going to smack the shit out of you for leaving the way you did, but she’s going to be happy you’re here.”

An IAB official waved Carisi over. “Take your coat off,” he told Barba, patting him on the back again. “Surgeon said we might be here a while.”

Carisi went over to chat with IAB, wedging himself between the sergeant who’d waved him over, his partner, and Tucker, keeping his back to Tucker. Barba rubbed his eyes. “Hey,” Rollins said, “she’ll pull through.”

Barba’s phone was ringing. He saw _Rachel Waller_ on the screen. “I have to take this,” he told Rollins.

She nodded and pointed to a secluded hallway.

“Rachel?” Barba said.

“Mr. Barba, I’m so sorry to bother you, but Ms. Davidoff wasn’t in and the paralegal said you went to the hospital for the police offer who got shot, and —” Rachel was crying. “Please, you need to help us.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“Emily’s pregnant. My parents and the church are thrilled about it. But — I don’t even want to say it, it’s so disgusting —”

Barba remembered a detail from the open cases, from the one case in Oregon they’d been able to get unofficial information on, a detail taht strongly suggested that Shane Firsey could not have fathered Emily’s baby. “You don’t have to,” he said. “Did you try the social worker?”

“Yes, and I couldn’t reach her either. I had to call the police. Shane had his friend her pregnant, because — because he couldn’t do the thing you need to do to get a woman pregnant.”

“We know,” Barba said. “We know that from the one girl in Oregon who was conscious enough to remember.”

He could hear Rachel sobbing, struggling to catch her breath on the other end. “My dad was here an hour ago. He twisted my aunt’s arm — it’s swollen now, it might be broken but she won’t go to the ER because she’s afraid for me —”

“Did he hurt you?”

“He grabbed me and was trying to pull me out the door, and my aunt screamed at him, said she’d tell the Daily News all about what was going on … somebody was in the car outside, too, I think my dad was going to grab me and throw me in the car and make me move back home. He was _so mad_ about what happened to Shane, not Emily, he’s happy she’s pregnant, he’s — Shane told her God wanted her to get pregnant —”

“Did you call 911?”

“Yes, but the police from our town came, and they put in a report, and they did nothing else. Nobody crosses the Firseys. Like my aunt says, they’ve got money and a cult behind them.”

“Okay. Try the social worker again.” 

He promised Rachel that she and her aunt would be safe, then went back to the waiting room, said a loud “excuse me” to two of the Nassau IAB investigators, brought them out into the hallway, shared with them what Rachel had shared with him, and told them that if PD didn’t arrest Shane’s friend on all four sexual assault charges available to them, the state police would make the arrest, and the governor would hear from them. 

They assured Barba that the friend would be picked up by the end of the evening, and PD would return to talk to Rachel’s and Emily’s parents a second time. “Good,” Barba said, “because there are literally hundreds of civil lawsuits I could file on behalf of my clients here.”

The IAB investigators briefly returned to the waiting room, then came back out with two more officers. They all caught an elevator back to the lobby, leaving Barba alone in the hallway again.

With his coat slung over his arm, he loosened his tie and leaned against the wall. 

Hospitals didn’t get to him like courtrooms did.

He’d expected, after he’d flipped that switch, carrying out Maggie Householder’s wishes, walking down a dark hallway echoing with arhythmic beeping, nurses eyeing him suspiciously, that hospitals would get to him. He remembered that night, he could still walk through that room, through all the bad decisions he’d made that night, in full focus. But what got him, what really got him, was Stone prosecuting him until he cried. In the courtroom, the two times he’d made it into courtrooms since February, all he felt, all his trembling limbs allowed him to feel, was _do you feel guilty_.

He’d failed Emily Waller. 

Yes, his very capable colleagues did the best they could, and, yes, he knew it was self-centered to imagine that he might have done any better, that he might have led the judge to a different decision, awarding temporary guardianship to Emily’s aunt so that the marriage wouldn’t happen, but —

The attorneys who went to court that day were five, six years out of law school, and they’d worked exclusively with cases involving minors. Emily was an adult who’d been lied to, repeatedly; Shane was a serial rapist. That was the sort of case that Barba had two decades worth of experience with.

He’d failed Emily, and Rachel too. 

He needed to get back into a courtroom and fix this.

Slowly, he shuffled back into the waiting rom, which was now somewhat emptier, somewhat less full of anxious bustle, than it had been when he’d arrived. Rollins was talking to Tucker and one of the IAB officers. She and Tucker sat beside each other, Rollins wearing a look of intense concentration.

“Yeah,” he heard her say, “it’s not gonna be tonight. Doctor said even if she’s out of surgery before 9, nobody’s going in to see her tonight. Give me your number, I’ll call you when there’s news.”

He saw Tucker nod and then leave with the other man, Rollins escorting them all the way to the elevators, not returning to the waiting room until the elevator doors were closed. 

Rollins grabbed Barba’s arm. “You can thank me later,” she said, and Barba raised an eyebrow. “She’s out of surgery. None of these guys need to know that yet. Doctor’s going to tell the rest of them to go home, nobody is taking her statement or collecting any bullets until tomorrow. Carisi went to relieve Fin, and you and I are going to see Liv as soon as they have her in the recovery room.”

Barba half-smiled. “I’m not sure I left on good terms,” he whispered.

“And that makes any difference now? I’m going in first, anyway, I’ll run it by her.”

After the waiting room cleared out completely, Barba crossed himself, breathed out, and shut his eyes tight, small gestures of relief, of gratitude, that Liv had pulled through. 

—

Benson opened her eyes and saw a bright light above her, the same metallic lamp she’d stared at when the nurse-anesthetist had told her to count backwards from 100. “You did great, Olivia,” a voice above her said.

She was alive.

Shaking, but alive.

Her throat ached, worse than the worst case of strep throat she’d ever had, but she was alive.

“That’s normal as you’re coming off the anesthesia,” the voice above her said, and someone touched her trembling arm, and she was _alive_.

She woke up a second time to find Rollins at the foot of her bed, in what must have been the recovery room. Her peripheral vision was obstructed by what looked like foam blocks on either side of her head. “Amanda. I’m alive.”

“Yes,” Rollins said, moving closer, taking Benson’s hand. “You had a lot of people cheering you on.”

“My leg —”

“Is in a brace, will be for a couple months. Muscle damage, the doctor will tell you all about it.”

“Noah?” she asked.

“Home with Lucy. We told him you were working late. Lucy will stay with him tonight, I’ll come for breakfast tomorrow and I’ll tell him a little about what happened, and he’ll come stay with us for a few days.”

She wasn’t sure she got all of that, but she understood that Noah was safe and taken care of. 

“I told all the brass they can get your statement tomorrow.”

“Good,” Benson said. “I don’t think I’m —”

“All there yet,” Rollins said, patting Benson’s hand. “It’s all right. Tomorrow you’ll hear about all the confusion.”

“Great,” Benson said, looking up at the ceiling.

“There’s one guy in the waiting room who I let stay.”

“Tucker?” she asked, scrunching her forehead.

“No. Barba.”

“Barba.” She let the name escape from her lips slowly. “Barba’s _here_?”

“He’s been working for a firm way out on the Island. His firm represents Rachel Waller and her aunt. We’ve been working different parts of the same case. He’s the one who sent Rachel to us to tell us about Shane’s priors.”

Benson sucked in a breath, the wooziness from heavy-duty painkillers overtaking her. “I’m so mad at him,” she said, the thought hitting her vocal chords well before it hit the conscious part of her brain. _I miss him_ , came the voice that, fortunately, remained in her head.

“You don’t want him to come in tonight?”

“No, no, let him, let him, if he came this — where has he been?”

“Suffolk County.”

“So right here.”

“40 miles, give or take a few.”

“Send him in. I’ll make him feel g— just send him in, I’ll go easy on him.” She was going to say _guilty_ , she was going to joke that she’d make him feel guilty, but even under the influence of painkillers and anaesthesia drugs, she’d realized that would have been a poor choice of words.

Rollins squeezed her hand, promised she’d break the news to Noah as gently as possible, and took off. 

Five minutes later, Barba was in the recovery room. 

He rushed in — no tie, no jacket, no coat, she noticed, he must have shed those in the waiting room — hurried to her bedside, clasped one of her hands in both of his, and _smiled_ , as if there was nothing different between them, as if he’d never left.

“Rafa,” she said. Her mind was in a thosuand places at once. “Amanda told me you were one of the attorneys who got Rachel Waller emancipated?” That was the most concrete thing she could remember at the moment.

“I’m so glad — I’m so glad you — you pulled through — I don’t know any other way to put it — you shouldn’t be in here in the first place.”

“You sent Rachel to us.”

“I did. I saw your name on the Firsey case, and I knew if there was anyone who could get those records unsealed —”

“I couldn’t. I tried.”

“We all did.” He was still clasping her hand. She noticed tears glistening in his eyes. 

“Why didn’t you call?”

He tilted his head to the side as if to say _you know, you know why I didn’t call._

“You didn’t have to kiss me goodbye and walk away like that.”

“No,” he said, because how could anyone argue with her now, “I didn’t.”

“Why did you disappear?”

He let out a sigh, slumping his shoulders but never letting go of her hand. “I let you down,” he said. “I put you in a position where you had to fix everything for me. These last few years, you were my best friend.”

“Then why did you _leave_?” His leaving still made no sense to her. Friendship wasn’t abandoning someone in front of a courthouse on the coldest day New York had seen in five years.

He kissed her hand. “Because I’m a fool. Because” — he looked up at the IVs above Benson’s head, down at her leg, at her eyes between the foam blocks, between the rails of the hospital bed — “I was in love with you. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, it’s inappropriate, I know you don’t feel the same way. That’s how much of a fool I am, I’m here telling you this when you should be resting and I should know better.”

“You _are_ a fool.” She tried to turn her head to look at him but the blocks were in the way. “You don’t know how much of a fool you are.”

“Believe me, Liv —”

“Rafa, what do you think I meant when I said “ _and?_ ” after that whole speech you gave me the day you left?”

“I thought you —”

“I thought you were going to tell me then that you were in love with me. I knew it, I figured it out too late, when I was already with Tucker, when I thought we had something stable going, when I didn’t want to — I didn’t —” She coughed a few times, hard. A nurse came over to check on her and explained that the coughing was an aftereffect of the general anaesthesia. 

“You don’t need to do this now,” Barba said, freeing one hand to touch Benson’s shoulder. “Don’t do this now. Rest.”

“I can’t believe you came all the way out here from Suffolk County.”

“Of course I did. I was terrified. Stupid me, I pushed you away and then my colleague told me you’d been shot and I was afraid I was going to lose you for good, I was afraid for Noah, for you, how frightening that must have been when you —”

“Carisi got me through it.”

“I love you.”

She smiled, wide. “I love you. Stay.”

“I think after they move you into a room, it’ll be too late for visitors.”

“I mean, _stay_.”

“Stay in your life.”

“Yes. I forgive you, Rafa, just stay.”

“Always.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope there is just enough fluff to make up for the:
> 
> 1\. spiders (mostly metaphors) and
> 
> 2\. fact that some of this sounds like a hokey PSA for exposure therapy/CBT [insert sarcastic "the more you know"-style star emoji here] and
> 
> 3\. kind of clunky ending.

Barba waited outside Benson’s bathroom, leaning against the wall with his arms folded while the shower ran, steam escaping through the slightly-open door. “Are you really just _standing_ out there?” she complained over the sound of running water. “The nurses at the hospital showed me how to do this. I’m fine. Stop worrying and have your coffee.”

“I’m not choking down another cup of that coffeepod shit.” He’d picked up a 12-ounce cup of real coffee from the cart across from Noah’s school earlier that morning anyway. With Lucy already on her way out of town to visit family for the holidays, Barba had volunteered to walk Noah to school on this last Friday before winter break began. 

He was taking off the entire week between Christmas and New Year’s to help Benson. At the office, he’d mentioned that he’d be away, Alicia jumped in with “are you spending the week with that NYPD lieutenant?” and he responded by rolling his eyes 180 degrees. “Aww,” a couple of his co-workers said. 

He felt good about taking off, though, because Rachel Waller had been able to get a restraining order against her parents, and her aunt was granted temporary guardianship for Emily (very limited, just enough to prevent the Wallers from making any decisions about her life or her preganncy), all within a few days. Nassau PD brass had responded quickly to Barba’s threat to file lawsuits against them on Rachel’s behalf. 

It still gnawed at him, though, that Emily and Shane never would have been married if he could have gotten that motion through in front of a judge. 

The shower turned off. “You _sure_ you don’t need any help?” he asked. 

“At this point, I think you just want to get a peek at my breasts.”

“That too.”

He heard the sounds of crutches banging against tile, and beautiful, wicked laughter.

Benson emerged from the bathroom, her hair wet, a towel precariously wrapped around her body, a brace reaching from her ankle all the way up to her still-bandaged thigh, plodding out on a pair of crutches. “See?” she insisted. “I’m fine.”

Barba trailed behind her to the bedroom. “I’m _fine_ ,” she said again, slipping on the shorts she’d left on the dresser, the best she could do on her own. She pulled a tank top over her head. With a dopey smile on his face, Barba flopped down onto the mattress.

She lay down next to him and squeezed his hand. Together, they stared up at the ceiling.

“I promise,” he said, “whenever you’re feeling up to it, I will kiss every part of your body except your forehead.”

“Please,” she said, starting to turn over, quickly realizing that her leg wouldn’t allow her to. He flipped instead, kissing her lips, long, languorous, sweet. They stayed like that for a while, kissing idly, catching up on five or six years’ worth of missed affection. 

Barba rolled onto his back again and they resumed staring at the ceiling. Rather, _Barba_ stared at the ceiling. “What are you looking at, Liv?” he teased, voice matter-of-fact, lips curled up in a smirk. 

She smacked his arm. “At a check I can’t cash right now.”

He let out a semi-satisfied laugh. 

Her eyes back on the ceiling, she let out a “hm.” “I’m going to have to retire,” she said.

“I know.” He tried to be gentle, comforting. “I know.”

“I can work as a civilian and still collect my NYPD pension, but — it kills me, having to retire this way.”

“There’s a firm out in Suffolk County that handles family and guardianship cases, could use an investigator with special victims’ experience, I hear.”

“Could you imagine that commute? We’d have to get a house out there, or Nassau, just to —” She cut herself off. “Wow. That was the Percocet talking.”

“Aw, Liv, I’d buy a house on Long Island with you,” he joked, maybe half-joked, “as long as you throw that coffeepod machine down the stairs.”

Still laughing to herself, she patted his hand. “How are you feeling?” she asked.

In the hospital one night, she’d asked him to stay a while longer because she couldn’t sleep, and 2AM Seinfeld reruns were monotonous, and he wound up telling her all about why he hadn’t been able to appear in court to stop Shane from marrying Emily. 

“Says the lady who just had a bullet removed from her leg.”

“I mean it. How are you feeling?”

“I’m okay.”

They stared at the ceiling for another minute or two. 

“There’s this entomologist,” Barba said, and Benson wrinkled her forehead as if trying to determine what could possibly come next, “who worked with spiders. PhD, top scientist in her field. One day, she and her colleagues were working with spiders in a big pit, a big pit of spiders, and she trips and falls into —”

“The pit of spiders.”

“Yes. It’s very hard to tell this story without saying _pit of spiders_ over and over. Anyway, she trips and falls. She’s got spiders crawling all over her, her legs, her arms, her face, everywhere. Her colleagues pull her out of the pit, get all the spiders off her —”

“My skin is crawling,” Benson said. 

“Tell me about it. So afterwards, days and weeks afterwards, she finds she can’t do her job anymore. She can’t do the job she’s been doing for 15 years. She can’t do the thing she’s an expert at, because she’s all of a sudden terrified of bugs. She’s terrified to do what used to come as second nature to her, because in the course of her brain doing what brains are supposed to do in situations like that, it reprogrammed itself.”

“Oh.” She turned her head and carefully slid closer so she could nuzzle her face into his neck. “You’re saying McCoy and Stone threw you into a pit of spiders.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll never forgive them.”

“I met with a therapist a few days ago, when you were still in the hospital. She told me the story about the spiders. Next week I’m starting a — a regimen — where I’ll be sitting in a courtroom alone a few times a week, then sitting in the gallery for a few cases, working my way up, re-exposing myself —”

“Re-exposing yourself,” she said, suppressing another laugh. “Sorry! Percocet. Definitely Percocet. I get what you’re saying. That works?”

“The entomologist was able to study spiders again. And there’s a lot of scientific evidence. You know me, Liv. No coffeepods, no bullshit interventions. This is for real.”

“Okay. Good.” She smiled at him, a gorgeous, bright smile that, in that instant, was everything. “I’m proud of you.”

For a moment, he was flustered. “I couldn’t go into the courtroom to help get Emily out of her parents’ house a month ago.”

She patted her leg. “I can’t chase a suspect.” 

“It’s not the —”

“You did what you could. You did more than that — I heard you got on Nassau PDs back when I was in surgery, threatened lawsuits left and right.”

“You know me.”

“I’m glad I do.”

“So, wading into the pool of spiders will be unpleasant —”

“For God’s sake, Rafa, please stop with the spider metaphor. I _hate_ spiders.”

“While going back into the courtroom will be unpleasant” — _because I cant’t seem to control the horror coursing through me_ , he wouldn’t add — “I need to get better. I need t get back to the place where I’m —”

“At home,” she suggested.

“The therapist said it could take more than a year.”

“You’ve always been the pinnacle of patience,” she teased. “I’ll tell you what. I’m not looking forward to the 4 days a week of PT I’ve got coming. It’s going to _hurt_. You do your therapy, I’ll do mine, and we’ll get on the phone at the end of the day, or get in bed at the end of the day whenever you can make it here, and we’ll bitch to each other about how much pain we’re in after all the hard work we’ve done.”

“Deal.”

“I’m glad you came back,” she said.

“I’m glad you didn’t use your other leg to kick me to the curb. You know I never meant to hurt you, right?”

She was able to turn just enough so she could run a hand through his hair. “You know I forgive you, right?”

“Right.” He kissed her lips once more, reminding himself that the next time either of them was thrown into a pit of spiders, they could reach out for each other’s hands, always.


End file.
